Is anyone able to recommend any books for learning Hungarian? I have got Teach Yourself and the CD's which are fine for pronounciation but hopeless for grammar. What I particularly need is a good course teaching grammar constructions and a good dictionary. Any ideas? Anna

Personally, I found Jerry Payne's Colloquial Hungarian text superior to TY Hungarian. It's not technically a grammar, but there is a lot of grammatical information in it including an extensive treatment of derivation morphology (i.e. how to form new words by means of prefixes and suffixes).

I would also like to learn Hungarian one day. Most of the documents and books where I live that were written prior to the end of World War I are written in Hungarian. Whole encyclopaedias and journals lying there in the library's archive and no one to read them.

I'm also 1/8 Hungarian and that great grandfather was also my namesake. And all I can say is good day?!

Once a friend of mine asked me if I could translate a brief passage in Hungarian (from the movie Chicago) and I got an Oxford Hungarian-Dictionary from the library. (I did this partly as a favour to her and also because I was really curious to see how the language worked.) That was a good dictionary, and my translation wasn't too off (I also submitted it to a language forum). Trouble is, I couldn't seem to find this dictionary online when I just searched for it. But if you see an Oxford Hungarian-English dictionary, buy it.

And good luck with Hungarian. It's a fascinating language, very unique.

It was a real pain to translate too, because I wasn't familiar with agglutinative grammar (in fact I'm still not really) but I got something somewhat close to the original meaning.

I love taking a good look at a language completely unrelated to my own, because since all of the morphemes are unfamiliar to me I can see how words are derived without having to worry about trying to figure out their meanings. And languages like Hungarian take word derivation to extremes.

I've been away at a conference the last few days, but have just got home and am catching up on posts. Thanks for the new ones. I shouldn't have too much trouble with agglutination as I've been learning Finnish for over a year now. One of the things I am keeping an eye open for are the similarities between Finnish and Hungarian.

Yes, neighbours often are/have been enemies in the past. Until the 20th century, the 'main' enemies of the English were the French. And don't get me started on the Welsh and the English...!